Book Reviews

📚“They’ll be Okay is an essential parents’ toolkit. Positive and practical. It is packed with good advice for parenting through all your child’s ages and stages.” Kim McCabe, author of ‘From Daughter to Woman, parenting girls safely through their teens’ and founder director of Rites for Girls.

📚”Collett Smart has written the perfect book for parents and caregivers of millennials. It is a challenging time for tweens and teenagers as they try to cope with the unchartered waters of social media and the internet. However, with this remarkable, well-written and informative book, adults can be reassured they will have accurate and research-based information at their finger tips. Well done Collett! A much needed book for our times.”Jayneen Sanders, children’s author, teacher and advocate for body safety education.

📚”Are you a parent or teacher looking for a comprehensive, readable, evidence-based resource for guiding teens/tweens in today’s sexualized environment? Order this book. ‘THE’LL be OKAY’ is brimming with awkward subjects and actual questions from teens/tweens. Smart supplies practical tips for dealing with them. More importantly, she models a philosophy and approach that a reader can integrate with ease. By the end of the book, parental feelings of helplessness are likely to diminish substantially, replaced by confidence and a reliable internal gyroscope.

Honest and factual, They’ll Be Okay urges thoughtful dialogue with teens/tweens as a way to help them understand their love-worthiness, and develop the ability to love others. Parents play a critically important role in providing sex/porn/intimacy education to their children…even in an era where they may have to check an online slang dictionary before they can comprehend their offspring’s questions.

Smart assures us that sexual feelings are normal, and emphasizes that what kids do with those feelings is what matters. “Teens are told, ‘Have sex when you are ready!’ but we forget to teach them to question how to be certain that the person they are with is also ready.” Smart urges kids to reflect on, and set, their boundaries in advance of encounters, and to discuss how they will know what a partner’s boundaries are.

Some of the tips Smart emphasizes are: never shaming kids for their curiosity or errors, modeling healthy behaviors, and inducing critical thinking and forethought. She furnishes specific tips and questions that parents and teachers can use with teens/tweens, such as: “What do you think that picture is trying to make you think/feel?” “What do you think a person in real life would feel if this happened to them?” She also shares specific phrases kids can use to stand up for those being bullied.

Smart urges parents and schools to recognize that porn exposure is inevitable and toxic, as well as furnishing ways they can ready themselves and their charges. She notes, “Discussions about pornography fit easily into programs on a healthy digital diet or digital citizenship, alcohol and binge drinking, family violence and bullying.”Gary Wilson, TEDx Speaker and Author: Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

THEY’LL be OKAY! Out now.

They'll Be Okay! - 15 Conversations to Help your Child Through Troubled Times